How Publicis Sapient builds human experiences to power digital transformation

Customer experience is always at the top of the corporate agenda – but often companies overlook how the experience of their employees or partners contributes to this key goal. Abby Godee, Chief Experience Officer at Publicis Sapient, discusses how the global technology consultancy helps clients understand the end-to-end nature of experiences – and how they can be harnessed for successful digital transformation.

Abby Godee is a leader with a proven track record in strategic experience design and innovation. When she joined Publicis Sapient in 2022, she brought with her 25 years of experience in both design, consulting and corporate management in Silicon Valley and Europe. Her experiences included executive roles with companies including frog design, Philips, and Deloitte.

At Publicis Sapient, a company with over 20,000 employees worldwide, Godee is responsible for setting the vision for how customer, user and employees are elevated and supported to drive human-centric digital transformation. 

“When I came in, Publicis Sapient was already on a tremendous growth curve,” she recalls. “It was an exciting time to join and there is a lot of support through the organisation for the mandate I’ve been given. Riding that momentum, we have been able to further drive quality, impact and expand our services and offerings.”

She explains that over the past 2.5 years, Publicis Sapient has more than doubled its Experience practice, hiring leaders and expanding teams across all corners of the globe. The firm has also closed a number of strategic deals, to accelerate growth in the domain and gain access to new markets.

“I’m trying to fill in leadership positions and deepen industry expertise across the teams to be able to offer increasing relevance and value to clients”, Godee says. “Arguably it’s not that ‘hard’ to design a good experience on the screen. Designing an app for something is not the challenge it once was.”

“But what is still really hard is having designers, researchers, experience strategists and content experts that know how to help clients make informed decisions and who can create solutions that connect to the intricacies of a client’s business challenges. That level of consultative expertise combined with deep craft is rare in professionals, it’s not easy to come by. Schools don’t teach this kind of “know how” – so we have to train our people to become great at it. That’s how we help clients invest their money wisely in the right experiences.”

The human side of experience

This is one of the most important points of Publicis Sapient’s offering. In the age of digital transformation, organisations across sectors have undertaken change programmes to strengthen their operations with new technology. But the potential of such technology can only be realised if it is applied to the right business problem and can be put into practice by the teams of humans in the organization.

Godee notes, “For digital transformation to succeed, you have to have an intense focus on the people impacted through that transformation. The most obvious, and the ones that people talk about the most, are the customers. That’s usually what’s funding the changes – doing something better and creating value for your customers.”

Yet in practice, delivering digital transformation is much harder than expected, with dozens of research reports reflecting on the ingredients that are needed for success. “A lot of times, when such programmes fail, it’s because they don’t take into account the impact on people. That includes employees, partners, third party developers, and other stakeholders.”

“As a company, Publicis Sapient therefore thinks very broadly about the humans who can help make the transformation succeed, understanding their needs and creating value for them. People are at the very heart of our approach to every digital transformation.”

End-to-end offering

Delving deeper into Publicis Sapient’s approach, Godee expands, “What separates a really impactful experience team from an underperforming one, is their ability to speak ‘the language’ of others – including IT, data, and the business. A designer or experience professional who doesn’t understand how to speak to a data scientist, who doesn’t understand the potential of experience afforded by data, is not going to be as effective as one who does.”

“Our integral approach looks to build understanding and empathy between our disciplines, so that they know how to bring the best out in themselves, and to cultivate the best from others.”

The importance of this ethos has recently been illustrated by a pair of engagements that Godee is especially proud of. One saw the consulting firm work with a large technology company to completely re-think the company’s content operations and engineering. The engagement helped the client increase the re-use of content across its enterprise by 85% and save over 50% in the costs of all content usage. 

“One of our recent engagements that has gotten a lot of attention has been Renault,” says Godee. “We helped them design a new service.” Indeed, Renault’s launch of a new charging infrastructure and app-based platform has been described as a gamechanger for EV uptake in the French market, and helped the company gain market share in the rapidly expanding space.

“We helped Renault design and build an ‘Airbnb’ of charging services across France, to support the growth of electric vehicles, and deal with the range anxiety of buying an electric car where there might not be such robust public networks of charging stations. That’s been amazingly successful and we’re very proud of it.”

The engagement resulted in Renault Plug Inn – a peer-to-peer app that connects electric car drivers to home charger owners. In areas where infrastructure may not be fully rolled out, this means EV drivers can find and book the home chargers available wherever and whenever they need it – while charger owners can make money by renting them out.

Talking through the engagement, Godee highlights the process through which the unique skill set of her team at Publicis Sapient brings out the best in its clients. First, the firm works with its clients to understand what is missing from their strategy, where they are overlooking new opportunities, where there are pain points – for instance, driving customer loyalty, rethinking the commerce experience or identifying new growth areas. 

During this phase, Publicis Sapient advises on a strategic level, and when opportunities are identified, the firm adds in deep experience in areas such as innovation, design, content or development. Once plans transition to realisation, the firm works across all facets of the development plan – organisation, people, processes and technology.

This requires that the Experience practice work closely together with other teams within the business, as part of Publicis Sapient’s overarching philosophy called SPEED, which stands for Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data & AI. Our “SPEED approach helps our clients achieve and sustain competitive advantage. I am globally responsible for the experience pillar in SPEED.”

In the case of Renault, Publicis Sapient brought the full breadth of its offering to life including conceptual collaboration with other parts of Publicis Groupe, Sapient’s parent company and one of the three largest Advertising and Media holding companies.

“We helped Renault develop their strategy for the service, including the campaign work, and bringing it all to life as a product and service. We helped with the design process, the backend requirements, the governance, the digital infrastructure, and technology. And then our Experience team further developed the idea to make an impact in the market and with electric vehicle owners.”

Looking ahead

To meet growing demand for its services, Godee says the Experience practice is growing. “Our practice currently has about 1,300 people across 25 different locations.”

“We have recently expanded in Latin America [where Publicis Sapient purchased Practia in 2023], are expanding our teams in all major markets, and investing in onshore and offshore presences in India and Romania, among others. But most of all, we are investing in training and developing the right capabilities for AI and generative AI across the organisation. Publicis Groupe is investing a massive $300 million in AI over the next few years, with Publicis Sapient a big part of driving that change.”

At the same time, the firm is looking at shifting further into different forms of experience. “There remains a tendency among CXOs to only focus on customer experience – but neglect the basic functions which underwrite this.”

“You’re going to see us dive more and more into employee experience, and sales and service experience in addition to experience for customers, consumers, patients and citizens. We are winning more and more work in these spaces, and our clients are telling us we have a unique offering compared to our competitors.”